1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to methods and systems for crystallizing molecules and more particularly to methods and systems for automating the crystallization of molecules.
2. Background of the Invention
Structure based drug development has become an important approach to developing new drugs. Structure based drug development relies on the ability to determine the three-dimensional structure of proteins with the crystallization of proteins being an essential step in determining their three-dimensional structures.
Molecules are generally crystallized by precipitating the molecule out of a solution. However, the process of growing high quality crystals involves trial-and-error with multiple solution variables such as pH, temperature, ionic strength, specific concentrations of salts, precipitants and detergents. As a result, many solutions must be tried in order to identify appropriate crystallization conditions. The preparation and manipulation of these solutions and the interpretation of the results is labor intensive. The use of human workers during this process is the most common source of errors and is often a large portion of the costs associated with crystallization trials.
A need exists for improved systems for crystallizing molecules and in particular proteins and other biological macromolecules.